Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Eight “Yeah Man, Masturbate in Heaven”

It’s been a little while since I picked this thread back up and I won’t be picking up exactly where I last set it down. I think the only show in between Boston and Belfast was Portland. Besides being the largest city in Maine Portland’s biggest claim to fame is that it has the same name as the one in Oregon leading to infrequent scenarios where people might have to ask “which one?” There are also quite a few Oaklands peppered across the United States that are generally good for a passing chuckle through the tour vehicle windshield but these are between shows.

Nobody ever actually plays in these Oaklands or if they do I’ve never heard about it.

I guess I’m actually going to talk about the Portland show. This guy named Ed set it up and his band Stand By Me was playing. I think they would have usually been somewhere on the hardcore to post hardcore spectrum but their singer had lost his voice before this performance so they played with a recording of some Americana type author. I’m just going to say Studs Terkel with full knowledge that this is probably wrong but whoever would know enough to correct me will probably decide it’s funnier this way.

You know that thing where somebody has only seen a word written down and the first time they say it in mixed company they make a shambles of the pronunciation and people laugh at them? I did that with that guy’s name. I said it “STOODS TARE-KELL” like I somehow genuinely assumed that the most unlikely of all possible pronunciations would just be correct.

I mean I did assume. I thought that was how you say it. People laughed at me.

The show was in an open field at the edge of town somewhere. A girl approached me and asked if she might do the dance thing with the spinning fire on top of the bus. I told her that that would not be possible and she conceded that this was probably an appropriate restriction from a safety perspective. I assured her that the decision was purely an aesthetic one.

The next show was up in Belfast. Many of the highway underpasses between Portland and Belfast were on the low side and there was some concern that the bus’s hunchbacked loft might not properly clear them. We were feeling especially cautious after a minor incident in a place called Folly Island near Charleston, South Carolina. We had assumed that some low hanging tree branches would “probably” be fine and ended up breaking a top window and admitting a veritable battalion of tiny spiders.

This had various repercussions. One of them was that the piece of plexiglass that got hastily fastened into place to replace the broken window surrendered to the wind somewhere along our route and only narrowly avoided triggering some larger catastrophe. The other issue was that in Cayce, South Carolina the onboard performance space was permeable to rain – bringing an abrupt conclusion to a performance by a project called Bald Ego featuring Adam Keith from CUBE:

“I gotta stop playing. My Kaoss Pad is soaked!”

All of this meant that the driver wanted to be especially cautious that the island’s folly not be repeated and had been abruptly slowing in order to ensure that each new vertical obstruction could be safely navigated. This was evidently concerning to some of the other motorists and an anonymous Good Samaritan decided to do us the courtesy of calling in the local constabulary. When we saw the familiar lights and pulled off the Interstate we found ourselves on an aptly named county access road called Dyer Strait.

To our good fortune Upper Dave happened to be behind the wheel and it just so happened that some kind of minor and easily remedied oversight back in California had left him with a recently suspended license that he had no knowledge of being a continent away from his mailbox. With the State Motto of Dirigo or I Direct embroidered in clear letters on their patches the officers were kind enough to direct him all the way to their county lockup. We rolled into Belfast’s Waterfall Arts Center minus a friend, companion and more relevantly for the night’s Living Hell performance a drummer.

Dan Beckman, whose constantly evolving project name has finally settled as Village of Spaces, set up the show for us and had been working at Waterfall Arts as a janitor. A lot of folks on the bus were long time friends of him and Amy Moon but it was my first introduction. I had been eager to see him play since an experience I had in Chicago the previous Winter.

I had come bursting into the Blog Cabin from a snowy night I wasn’t dressed for with a head full of dark thoughts and acid. A girl named Amanda was listening to his music on the computer and began rubbing the life back into my near frozen hands as the lyrics to a song called Greensboro, NC similarly smoothed the cold and chaos from my thoughts:

“You can walk it off, you can walk on home they swear

You’ll be all right they swear, you’ll be OK”

This show was also my first time meeting Crissy and Bonny from Taboo. The band was in the process of developing their more theatrical style but I was most excited about their personalities. It felt like I had stumbled into a cabal of nineteenth century cartoon villains that I had secretly always belonged to. It got to my head: when I rode along to pick up Dave from the police station I was practically twirling my hair like a besotted schoolgirl:

“Hey Dave, should I move to Maine and live with all the other vampires?”

“Yeah man. Masturbate in Heaven.”

We stayed over at the house called RoHeGe that I’ve always heard is named after three sisters that grew up there but nobody has ever told me when this was or how anybody knew about them. I took a walk alone the next morning and ended up in a small village graveyard looking at colorful turkey tail mushrooms. For most of the tour I was wearing a white rabbit fur coat and women’s corduroy pants so with my long hair I would have been easy to mistake for a woman from behind.

The next Winter in Chicago the Pilsen Police began a campaign of targeted harassment against the women in our subculture who lived in that neighborhood. They claimed to be under the impression that they were working as prostitutes which seems unlikely as I’ve never heard of anybody soliciting from a bicycle in any city on Earth. Anyway it was a common thing that Winter to notice a searchlight on my back as I was biking or walking home until to have the cops speed off the moment I turned around and they saw my facial hair.

I assume that something similar was happening in the Belfast graveyard but I suppose it’s also possible that I actually represented exactly what this person was looking for and they had just been preternaturally lucky: a tall, thin genderqueer glam rocker. Anyway I heard whistling and when I turned to look a generic somewhat older somewhat balding somewhat heavy man was masturbating in my general direction while darting from tree to tree and continuing to whistle. My next move is somewhat mystifying but I will attempt to explain my thought process.

I called the police.

I thought that this person was actually targeting women and was a sexual predator and me alerting the authorities might help make Belfast a safer place for the women that lived there. Obviously the third part is ridiculous. It actually just occurred to me that the graveyard could have been a cruising spot and I might have looked like exactly the sort of person who would have been there to cruise too but even if we accept the first two parts of my statement as true I had already been given ample evidence that the local police had no interest whatsoever in helping or protecting people anything like me.

If I thought that this person constituted an actual threat to women’s safety the best thing I could have done is confront this person myself and try to convey that their behavior was unacceptable through either force or the threat of force. I would have been wearing a dagger on my belt – pointing it in his direction and saying something along the lines of “hey don’t wave your dick at me creep” would have done more to change this person’s future behavior than calling in an authority figure who would never believe me to begin with.

The Belfast Police were clearly more of a threat to women in my community than a random pervert masturbating in a graveyard and the one upside to my calling them is whatever officer responded to my call would have been too busy for the hour or so that this took to otherwise harass, victimize or be a general nuisance to the women, punks, queers or otherwise vulnerable citizens of Belfast.

Be all that as it may I did in fact call the police. I didn’t have a cell phone so I walked to a nearby pharmacy or grocery store and then back to the graveyard to wait. A police officer came and I explained to him what had happened. He looked at me incredulously:

“You sure he wasn’t just taking a piss?”

I offered the universal gesture:

“Do you piss like this officer?”

He rolled his eyes:

“When did you say y’all were leaving town again?”

At that moment the members of Taboo happened to be driving by in a short black bus they had converted to run on vegetable oil so I told him that it wouldn’t be long now and ran over to get a ride. They asked me why the cop had been harassing me and I explained that I had actually called him.

A small epilogue to this incident happened several years later when I was talking up Taboo to a friend and pulled up the first live video I could find on YouTube. I can’t remember if this would have been LaPorsha or somebody else I had a brief romantic fling with or crush on I just remember the clear feeling of having some level of that kind of energy toward the person and pulling up the video in a very “check out my cool friends who also think I’m cool” way only to discover that it was a video of them making fun of me for having called the police.

It’s harder to find things on YouTube than it used to be. Some things got taken down and there’s more stuff up there and maybe in one of their mergers they changed the way the search function works. I only know that a lot of things that used to be easy for me to find on there are impossible to find now. I feel this way about so many things that used to be on the internet between 2000 and 2010: Flickr groups? Old noise forums? Anything that got uploaded to MySpace? It’s all gone now and your odds are better of finding an obscure record that was pressed in the ‘70s than any of this stuff.

Or I’m just stupid and bad at finding things. Anyway I don’t think they had a whole song devoted to making fun of me for calling the police – it was just a really long interlude of between song banter. I think it was one of the performances from the armband era when misguided protestors would try to get their tours and shows cancelled under the assumption that they were at least promoting neofascist imagery if not ideals.

So much wasted and misguided effort: protesting appearances by a band you know nothing about, touring the country in black suits with red armbands in the full knowledge that people will take it out of context and get offended, calling a police department that just arrested your friend in a clear display of contempt for your artistic community and the values you share. I hope that all of us are making better decisions and spending our time in more meaningful ways.

I was reconnecting with an old friend recently when the conversation took an unexpected detour into what sides we might have ended up on in the vaccine debate. I’ve been avoiding whatever the next step is but I’m tired of playing ideological hot lava with Venn diagrams. Obviously there are ideologies and ideas that are objectively horrible but what I’m getting at is I can’t imagine going out of my way to ask anybody if they got a vaccine or not in 2023 but I know I have friends on both sides that this is all still really important too.

I was going to write about going to Liberty, Maine and the tool museum but it got really late so I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/10/maine-2008-the-bus-that-shacks-got-a-lot-of-a/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/